“Epic Fury”: The End of Great Dreams

Whatever its final outcomes may be, the “Epic Fury” war has already marked a definitive turning point in the Middle East. The aftermath of the American-Israeli war on Iran will not resemble what preceded it. We can say with confidence that postwar Iran will no longer be the Iran we once knew. The same is true of Israel and the United States. Neither will emerge from this war unchanged, even if the scale and nature of transformation will differ from one actor to another.

On June 3, 2026, Vali Nasr and Narges Bajoghli wrote in Foreign Affairs about the profound transformation reshaping Iran in the wake of the war. They argued that a layer of the bureaucracy that is “insufficiently ideologized” is now positioned to seize the reins of the Iranian political system. The two authors appear to be right. The war is likely to produce a fundamentally different version of the Iran we have known.

If Khomeini’s Iran, from 1979 to 1989, was the Islamic Iran — heir to Third Worldist liberation discourse — and if Khamenei’s Iran, from 1989 to 2026, was defined by a national security doctrine anchored primarily in a forward-deployed proxy strategy, then the Iran of Khamenei’s son, in the aftermath of the 2026 war, is first and foremost the Iran of technocrats.

The New Technocracy in Iran

Anyone listening closely to the cultural debates in Tehran today will notice a sharp divide between two tendencies among those who still call themselves “revolutionaries,” especially among the youth of the Revolutionary Guard.

The first is a deeply localized trend. It represents the children of those who carried out the 1979 revolution, or more precisely the children of the regime’s military and bureaucratic class. The second is a trend still animated by grand Islamic or revolutionary aspirations, although its adherents are few. They mostly come from the lower-middle class and from families that migrated from the countryside to the cities in search of better education and social mobility for their children. Unlike the first group, this second faction sees itself as loyal to the original dreams of the revolution: the revolution of the oppressed, the struggle for social justice, and confrontation with America through an internationalist revolutionary discourse and practice.

Yet this second faction holds little real influence. Power lies with the first group. This class lives off the benefits, gains, and institutional privileges of the regime. For the most part, it represents the military-bureaucratic environment that emerged from the mid-level ranks of the security and military establishment, especially those who migrated from the countryside to the cities in the early 1990s. Their children define themselves, above all, as Shias and Iranians — nothing more. For them, Iran is simply “the State of Imam Mahdi.” Yet what this phrase actually means remains unclear. What criterion governs their understanding of Mahdism? Unclear. What is their vision of the world surrounding Iran? Also unclear. The only clear thing is that they are a product of the regime and its culture.

The regime has long suffered from a cultural and ideological vacuum, visible in the vast gulf between its slogans and its reality. Economically, the Iranian system has been built on a consumerist capitalist structure, while ideologically it has continued to speak in the language of “Resistance Economy” and Eqtedar — capability, power, and strength.

Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who succeeded Khomeini, managed this contradiction by balancing the regime’s various factions in his approach to the international order. His policies were Shia in Iraq, Islamic in Kashmir and the Balkans, revolutionary in Palestine, and pragmatic in the Gulf. This maneuvering reflected political shrewdness and tactical cunning, yet it also revealed a deep ideological vacuum at the heart of the regime — a vacuum mirrored in its cultural concepts.

An observer would struggle to extract a definitive answer from members of this class regarding the meaning of Shiism or the Khomeinist revolution. Some define it in a narrow sectarian sense: Shiism against Sunnism. Others define it as a blend of Shia culture and Third Worldist revolutionary culture. Some see it as purely Islamic. Others understand it as a revolution for social justice. Ultimately, the concept of the revolution, and the purpose toward which it is supposed to move, remains foggy and ambiguous.

Previous Debates

Shortly after the death of Imam Khomeini, a noisy cultural debate emerged in Iran over the identity and meaning of the revolution. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president, championed the theory of the “model state.” Rafsanjani believed that Iran should become a model of a democratic state open to the international order. In his view, this democratic model — rather than permanent confrontation — was what would make Iran an example for the peoples of the region.

Unlike Khamenei and the Larijani family, Rafsanjani did not place confrontation with the international community and “Global Arrogance” (Estekbar) at the center of his political vision.

Khamenei, by contrast, appeared liberal on domestic economic policy while standing on the far left in matters of international relations and confrontation with Global Arrogance. As for the Larijanis, their vision was articulated most clearly by Mohammad-Javad Larijani, brother of Ali Larijani, the former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Mohammad-Javad Larijani advanced the theory of Umm al-Qura, or the “Mother of Cities.” Inspired by a Quranic perspective, this theory held that Iran must remain secure and stable above all else. To achieve that, it had to develop its forward-deployed proxies — its long arms beyond its borders — in order to guarantee its own national security.

This vision became the foundational framework through which Iran balanced its various political currents. It allowed the regime to combine revolutionary language with national security logic, ideological ambition with state survival, and anti-imperial discourse with pragmatic calculations.

A New Page

The recent war has turned the page on these competing theories inside Iran. Iran had already lost much of its forward-deployed proxy structure — Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah — even before the war began. For the first time since 1989, the year the Iran-Iraq War ended, Iran faced its adversaries directly.

At its core, the war was a condensed manifestation of everything Iran had achieved under Khamenei’s rule across culture, society, economy, politics, and armaments. In all these fields, Iran appeared traditional, classical, and slow-moving. Yet it also proved capable of inflicting harm on its opponents through self-reliance and internal capacity.

This experience has triggered a series of difficult questions within the regime’s bureaucracy. To what extent does the theory of relying on proxies still protect Iran? To what extent has Islamic discourse secured pan-Islamic sympathy for the regime? Have the Third Worldist revolutionary theories promoted by the elites of the early revolution brought Iran any real strategic benefit?

The most dangerous aspect of this debate is that many of the answers point toward a retreat, or at least a decline in the logic of confrontation among many of these “revolutionaries.” In the aftermath of this war, Iran has become far more self-aware as a state and as a nation. This does not mean that the new Iran will strip itself of its revolutionary mantle or abandon its anti-Western slogans. It almost certainly will not. Yet what seems clear is that Iran today is far more preoccupied with reality than with revolutionary dreams.

In 1980, during the American hostage crisis, the Egyptian writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal visited Tehran and met with Khomeini and the revolutionary students at Tehran University. He recorded his observations about the revolution in his book A Visit to a New Arab History, noting that it was “a celebration of martyrdom to the point of failing to grasp reality and its constraints.” Heikal’s observation was precise. It captured one of the defining features of earlier Iranian politics.

Today, however, Iran has changed. It may even be that Iran has moved to the opposite extreme: from excessive revolutionary romanticism to excessive pragmatism. That is the Iranian story. As for America and Israel, that is another story — one I will leave for upcoming articles.